Land Pro Civil: Custom Website Launch in 10 Days

Overview

Land Pro Civil is a senior-led civil engineering firm run by Paul Wallick, PE, licensed in Minnesota, Colorado, North Dakota, and Utah. Paul handles site planning, grading, drainage, stormwater, utilities, and permitting for residential subdivisions, commercial sites, industrial campuses, mixed-use developments, and ground-mounted solar projects across Minnesota and the Front Range.

The pitch is simple. You get a senior PE on every project from start to finish. No project manager layer. No junior engineer learning on your job. No big-firm overhead baked into the fee. The work is the same caliber as the larger firms. The bill is meaningfully smaller.

The site he had did not match any of that. He came to Snack Club Marketing with a Wix template, a contact form that was eating leads, and zero technical SEO. We rebuilt every page, fixed the form, and laid an SEO foundation that scales.

The Challenge

Paul had the credentials, the project portfolio, and the referrals. What he did not have was a website that helped a developer or architect take him seriously when they Googled the firm.

The previous site had several real problems:

• A Wix template that looked generic and did not communicate Paul's seniority or pricing edge
• No real service or industry pages, so search traffic for queries like "civil engineer Twin Cities" or "stormwater MN" was not reachable
• Contact form was running through a free service that Microsoft 365 was silently quarantining, so leads to the firm's main inbox were never arriving
• No structured data, no proper canonicals, no sitemap, no analytics. Ahrefs site health score was 10 out of 100
• No Google Business Profile or Bing Webmaster Tools setup, so the firm was invisible in local pack and AI-search results

The Strategy

Instead of patching the Wix site or moving to another template builder, we built from scratch. The brief was a launch, not just a website.

We focused on three priorities:

1. Position the firm online the way Paul positions himself on a sales call: senior, direct, and meaningfully more affordable than the big firms
2. Build the SEO foundation that lets developers, architects, and landowners find Land Pro Civil for the queries they actually search
3. Fix the lead system end to end so when someone fills out the contact form, Paul actually gets the email

What We Built

One launch. The full stack.

44-page custom build. Home, About, Projects hub, blog, plus 8 service pages, 4 industry pages, 6 region and city pages, and 13 case studies. Every page hand-coded, no page builder. Tailwind for utility, custom CSS layer for brand specifics.

Brand and visual system. Navy and clay color palette, Archivo and Inter typography, real project photography from the firm's actual MN and CO work, and a consistent component library across every template.

SEO foundation. Sitemap, robots.txt, llms.txt for AI search engines, canonical tags, OG and Twitter metadata, JSON-LD structured data on every page, and a search-aware information architecture mapped to real developer and architect queries.

Contact form that actually delivers. Built as a custom Vercel serverless function that sends through Gmail SMTP. Reply-to is set to the lead so when Paul replies, his response goes straight to the inquirer. Bypasses the M365 spam filtering that was eating the previous form's submissions.

Domain and DNS migration. Cut over the apex and www records to Vercel without touching MX, SPF, or DKIM. Email service stayed up. SSL provisioned automatically. apex to www redirect locked in.

GA4 analytics. Google Analytics 4 installed across all 44 pages with a consistent measurement ID, ready for goal and audience tracking.

Search engine setup. Google Search Console verified, sitemap submitted. Bing Webmaster Tools imported. IndexNow key deployed and 43 URLs submitted to the Bing index for instant discovery.

Google Business Profile. Service-area business setup, professional photo gallery, eight service categories, fifteen service-area cities, and pre-seeded Q&A.

Site health remediation. Ahrefs audit cleanup. Title and meta length normalized across 39 pages, structured data validated, broken JavaScript removed, dead links repaired. Site health score went from 10 out of 100 to a perfect 100.

The Form Story

This is the part most agencies would never catch.

The original contact form was a free third-party service that posts submissions to your inbox via SMTP. Most websites use one of these. The problem is that Microsoft 365 has aggressive sender reputation filtering, and the free form services run on shared sender domains with low reputation scores.

Paul's leads were arriving at his M365 inbox, then being silently quarantined before he ever saw them. No bounce, no notification, no error message. Just disappeared.

We replaced the entire form with a small Vercel serverless function that sends through a real Gmail account. Gmail's sender reputation with M365 is solid. Reply-to is set to the lead's email so Paul can reply normally and have it route directly to them.

Result: the form stopped eating leads. The first inbound came in the day the new site went live.

Before vs After

Before

• Wix template that did not match the firm's seniority
• Contact form silently dropping leads into M365 quarantine
• No service or industry pages
• Ahrefs site health: 10 out of 100
• Invisible in local pack and Bing

After

• 44-page custom-coded site at landprocivil.com
• Working contact form delivering through Gmail SMTP, reply-to set to the lead
• Service, industry, region, and city pages tuned for real search queries
• SEO foundation rebuilt across every page
• Ahrefs site health: 100 out of 100, perfect score
• Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster, IndexNow, Google Business Profile all live

The Impact

Land Pro Civil now has a website that matches the level of the firm. The first lead arrived through the new contact form on launch day. The site reads as senior, credentialed, and findable on the queries developers and architects actually use.

More important than any single number, Paul now owns the system. The site is not locked into a template builder, the form is not held hostage by a third-party SaaS, the SEO foundation is documented, and the analytics are wired in. It can grow with the firm.

Client Feedback

"Joe handled the whole launch end to end, from the design and the words on the page to the email and DNS migration. The first inbound lead came in the day the new site went live."

— Paul Wallick, PE, Founder, Land Pro Civil